A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:50:41 · Chris Slowe
[00:50:41] S0: Yeah, I mean, I think that some of the things – actually, at this point in my career, I have entire mental frameworks about scaling orgs, which I find terrifying to say out loud. Again, having 1,000 people on my team right now means that I don't think in terms of individuals; I think in terms of teams and org shapes. The evolution of a startup, there's a point usually that happens around the series B phase, which is almost like the startup adolescence phase where it's like nothing quite fits. You don't really know what you're doing anymore because you've had enough success to get a couple of rounds of VC. Usually that's when they you try to expand the product portfolio and you discover that things aren't sticking as well as they were on your mainline product, and you're also going through the team growth phase of – there's a switchover that happens at around 50 people where you go from effectively a small tightly knit family almost, not to abuse the term, into more of like, no, there are just people who are your coworkers who you don't necessarily know very well. That can be very tough for startups to go through because there's so much initial work that is based on implicit distributed trust across the entire company. Those two things tend to hit about the same point, which is usually around the series B and that's a fun problem where you start to think about things – you think about teams rather than individual people. That's usually the point also where you have to hire a real manager, hire somebody who's been a director before to actually start laying out processes that actually help you scale your business. I think that was actually the place where that's where I feel like I learned the most at Hipmunk was actually building a company up to 100 people and then also got a chance to start deploying that toolkit, coming back to Reddit when it was roughly the same size.
00:52:23 · Pablo Srugo, Chris Slowe
[00:52:23] S1: Chris, it was great having you on the show. [00:52:25] S0: Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. [00:52:29] S1: I just gave you content that you like so much. You actually listened to the end. Guess what? You didn't pay a single dollar. Not only that, I didn't even put any ads in your face, so you just got a bunch of content for free. Now that I've delivered that value, I'm asking for something in return. Open your app, open Apple Podcasts, open Spotify, open whatever app you use to listen to this and hit that follow button. It's actually going to help you because it's going to help you make sure you don't miss out on the next episode, which you like so much that you listen to the whole thing.